City Of Thousand Temples

My first graduation project, developed with two of my fellow peers, David Waldhaus und Marcel Füzes.Happy to finally share the finished project with others after three and a half months of hard work.My main responsibilities were asset development (especially vegetation), crowd modeling, dynamic simulations and scenes assembly.

ProjectThe project was done in a collaboration with Marcel Füzes und David Waldhaus. We got inspired by the India Project from the matte department and wanted to create a similar shot. We found the concept „City of thousand temples“ by Dmitry Zaviyalov and we decided to use this as our reference.

BlockoutThe project started with a lot of planning and workflow development, to be able to complete such a big project. We started to block out the city and animate the camera, to know where to put in the most detail.Thanks to Philipp Willer for helping us with the final camera movements!

Asset DevelopmentFor the asset development we produced a list of assets we wanted to create. My main responsibility was to take care of the vegetation in the whole city. We needed some smaller plants to fit in the city itself between buildings and some bigger trees so that we were able to also build a whole forest. So I created a library of plants and trees based on the kind of vegetation that was given in our concept.Added to that I also created some buildings (including modeling, texturing and shading), like a tower, a house, and several buildings near the river for the downtown parts of the city.

Crowd ModelingTo give the city life and let it look inhabited, we wanted to have people walking around. So I created two low poly meshes for the male and female body and added a different variety of cloths which we could use in Goleam to get a more random look on the crowd.

Water and Smoke SimulationSo the city feels more natural we added some dynamic aspects like smoke coming out of a chimney and a flowing river with ships driving on it. The river simulation was created with Mayas boss system, which fits perfectly to our needs, and the smokes I created with the Maya fluid systems, with different variations, and offsetting the smokes brought a unique look to each of them.

Scene AssemblyFor the bigger parts of the scene we built different city blocks and used Arnold StandIns to handle such a big scene. In the end frame we manually wanted to layout the buildings to get as close to the concept as possible. Marcel Füzes created several scripts that enabled us to layout the assets as easy as possible. I was responsible for the area around the river and the forest in the scene.

As our final render turned out great we got the opportunity to write an article at VFX magazine 80. level.